Ever After (5 page)

I took one step back, but the cat’s triangular head lowered as it put its weight on its back haunches. A low, guttural growl rolled over in its chest. Moonlight glinted off its eyes as it narrowed them to slits. The monstrous cat sauntered to the left, then halted.

Holding lifelessly still, I trembled. My breath burned in my lungs.

In a long, black fluid movement, the cat turned toward me. It took one step and halted, lowering its head to assess me. Tilting its head as it took me in, it growled again.

I tried to inch back but stopped when something dark and shadowy slinked across the ground between us.

The cat lunged.

I tried to dart to the left but stumbled back.

The cat’s long body stretched and soared over me.

I tumbled backward down the embankment. I stopped rolling and slid on my stomach, but the momentum I’d built dragged me downward. Rocks and exposed fingers of roots scratched my stomach and tore my nails as I grasped for something, anything to hold.

Rocks and dirt broke free from the embankment and landed on my shoulders. Every tree root I grabbed for snapped, causing me to slide more.

I scrambled and dug at anything that would slow my ascension, when an arm scooped from nowhere and brought me to a stop. My nails dug into flesh as I scrambled for a sturdy hold.

Hot, irregular breath washed over my face as my slight frame slammed into the long body of a human, a male.

He leaned in with me toward the embankment, grasping me firmly to his chest. His strong arms eased me down to a firmer footing. When the moonlight gave me partial view of his face, the air was sucked from my body. The smooth planes of his face weren’t possible.

High cheekbones, a clenched jaw line, and a pair of perfectly set apart eyes were haloed by wavy brown hair that brushed his cheeks. He held me so close our noses could have touched. His forearms were perfectly capable of tossing me fifty yards with no effort.

“You’re okay. I’ve got you now. The screaming is really unnecessary,” he said in an accent I couldn’t place, though I’d heard it before. A serious, aggravated expression creased the stranger’s forehead.

Breathe. I had to breathe or I’d pass out.

He loosened his grip on me and turned me to face the embankment.

Out of his embrace, air was colder and breathing was more difficult.

The young man wiped his eyes and surveyed the roots beside and below us. He grimaced and placed my hand on a sturdy tree root. When he turned back to me, he locked me into a gaze that could have melted titanium. For a moment, the space between me and this mysterious stranger thickened with electric, sizzling air.

My lungs stopped burning, but my heart stammered.

“Can I have my hand back?” His body stiffened under my touch.

No.

Reluctantly, I released him from my grip.

The stranger gently placed my other hand on another root. He left his hand over mine for a second and turned that unsettling gaze back to me. He shuddered slightly and tensed. “Now would you try not to get yourself killed if I jump to the pond edge and guide you down?”

I nodded.

“There, put your foot on that rock.” He gestured to a white stone that jutted like a bony elbow out of a wall of red mud. “You should be able to find a rock for each step almost to the bottom.”

Far below me, he’d landed with perfect ease. I was still four full body-lengths above his head. Pressing my body closer to the embankment, I used the dirt wall to support my forehead. Slow, deep breaths steadied my thrashing heart.

“It’s not that far now. Just ease your right foot about two feet down. You should find the loop of a root to stand on.”

In a few seconds, he’d guided me as far down the wall as I could go without having to jump. The rocks and small roots were too unstable for footing.

“When you jump, push back from the wall. Don’t worry. I’ve got you. I promise.”

That voice. It reverberated inside me. My head swam. I gripped at another loose root. A stone broke free, and I began to slip.

Expecting to meet with the ground, the stranger caught me under my back and legs. His shirt was soft and seductively musky under my cheek.

He put me down but kept me in the loop of his arms. His grip didn’t loosen immediately. “Can you stand?”

That accent. Where had I heard it?

The air thickened and the night sounds silenced.

His arms were vice grips as his heart slammed against my chest. “You’re going to have to walk.”

My cheeks burned. I stepped out of his arms as a searing pain spread through my hand.

He started to say something but stopped. A jagged rock had slashed my palm open. He took a deep breath and held it as blood splattered the ground. It covered the front of his T-shirt. Stumbling back, he stuttered.

“We should get that”—he turned away from me—“cleaned up and bandaged.” His voice was monotone. He stepped farther away.

“It’s just a little blood,” I said and started to the pond. Just as my fingers grazed the water, he grabbed me by the waist and jerked us both back where we toppled to the ground.

“What’s wrong with you?” I flinched out of his grip.

“It’s stagnant. You want an infection to set in, go ahead and dip your hand in there.” His voice was cold. He pulled his T-shirt around and, with little or no effort, wrenched a long strip off, bearing some of his stomach in the process. Slapping the fabric around my hand, he jerked it into an angry knot.

I cried out.

He regarded me with sympathy for the first time since the fall, and loosened the knot. A little. Sounding so proper it was out of place, he said, “I wouldn’t purposely cause you pain. I apologize.”

“I’ll be fine.” I held my hand up to slow the blood flow, but it still soaked the T-shirt. And it hurt. Bad. Tears threatened to break free, but I refused them.

The guy inspected the knot and shook his head.

“I’m such a klutz.” I pressed the wounded hand to my chest.

“Apply pressure,” he said, the last word through clenched teeth. He put space between us as he distracted himself with looking between the embankment and a path that led off into the woods behind the pond.

The full moon’s light slid down his chocolate brown hair to his muscular neck and over his shoulders.

How could a man look that good in a simple white T-shirt and not be poised on the front of a magazine?

As he considered our options, he pinched the bridge of his nose in frustration. “If I take you back up the bank, we’ll only cut your hands further, but if we take the path through the woods, it’ll take an hour to get back around to the driveway. You get all her money. You could at least have the brains not to fall down an embankment.”

“And this is my fault?” Everyone here considered me a trailer park, gold digger. Rage raised my voice an octave. “A big cat almost ate me, and I was trying to—wait.”

He didn’t look at me.

The rage dissipated to suspicion. How did you just happen to catch me in the middle of my almost-plummet to death? And how did you get away from that cat?”

His face twitched in the moonlight. “I come down here a lot. Tonight, I was walking the edge of the pond when I heard your screams, so I climbed the wall. When I saw you start to fall, I jumped to where I knew there was good enough footing to catch you. I barely escaped the cat myself. Now, are you coming or are you staying out here with the carnivores?”

“So, you just expect me to roam into the woods with a stranger? In the dark? Alone?”

“An animal just tried to eat you. It’s fine by me if you want to stick around to see how long it takes for him to come back for seconds. Otherwise, I’m Cole Kinsley.” He jutted out his hand in mock offering. “We’re no longer strangers, so let’s get you back home before my uncle sends out a search party.”

Cole took his hand back before I could infect him with trailer park germs.

“You’re Cole,” I repeated. That made sense. Well, sort of. I hadn’t expected the weed eater guy to be Thomas’s mean nephew.

Trailer park rolled over and over in my mind. The jab was completely undeserved, and jab is just what I wanted to do to him. Right in the eye.

“I see my uncle’s been talking.”

“If you didn’t want me in your girlfriend’s room, all you had to do was come tell me instead of yelling it through the house.”

“I find it disrespectful to sleep in a dead girl’s room. And equally disrespectful to eavesdrop,” he said through tightly clenched teeth. He squared his shoulders and turned away, continuing without me. “And the trailer park remark. You know what they say. You can take the girl out of the trailer park. You know the rest.”

“Eavesdrop? I’m sure I’m not the only person in the house who overheard you rambling on like a lunatic. And if this is about your precious flower bed, I’ll replace the flowers.” Tears burned my eyes. I stomped in his path. Well, he was definitely not my dream guy. I had to have been transferring my emotional need over on to the first guy I saw.

Cole turned back. The same weird green flash I’d seen in his eyes at the front entrance sparked again. “Of course, you can afford to re-landscape the whole property. You have all her money.”

That was it. “To set the record straight, you jackass, I’ve never lived in a trailer. Not that I’m above doing so if the situation were to arise. And to be honest, I have no idea why I’m here. If she really did choose me for that, then, she had to be demented or something. No woman in her right mind would leave her whole estate to a stranger.”

“No, when Ava Rollins says—said—she was going to do something, she did it. No matter how outlandish the scheme. And leaving it to you was pretty damned outlandish, if you ask me. Now every member of the staff has to worry if you’re going to sell it off to some kook who’s gonna kick us out on a whim.” He purposely walked faster. What did he do? Run marathons for fun?

“If it is mine, I have no plans to sell it.” I pushed through some brush into a clearing. The lights from the house had disappeared and only night sounds surrounded us.

“So, you’ve decided to stay?” He spun around to grace me with a burgeoning glare.

“I don’t know. I haven’t given it much thought. I did just arrive. Some welcoming committee you are.”

“Welcome isn’t the gesture I was going for. You guessed it, Dr. Phil.” Cole made another blow at something he couldn’t know about me.

Had these people seriously researched me before I got here?

“I have no plans of changing anything, if that’s what you’re getting at.” Maybe I could clear up this misunderstanding and stop this guy’s animosity before we got too far out. He was too unpredictable. I’d be safer with Dalton, the known womanizer.

He rambled on. “…and if you don’t know a place, you shouldn’t go off trekking on your own. You never know what trouble you might run across.”

“Well, thank you for the kind direction, sir. Though the advice is about ten minutes and probably twenty stitches too late. I’ll remember that next time I decide to roll down a hill accidentally.”

He walked on, and from behind, his ears lifted a little. He’d smiled. The nerve.

“Who has a ravine behind their house that they don’t warn people about, anyway?”

“The fence? The gate? Didn’t those two big landmarks give you a clue? Come on or you’ll never make it back before dinner.” He waved me on in irritation.

We were quiet for a ways, giving me a chance to simmer down. I remembered the pond. Where had I seen it?

“The pond hasn’t always been a pond. It was cut off from Moonglow Lake. The lake is a reservoir for the northern streams and feeds the southern streams.” The velvety roughness of his voice made it almost impossible to be mad at him, if it weren’t for the inherent cocky undertones. “Mr. Rollins, the original owner of the property, filled in the stream and made it a pond. His daughters used to swim here. Now it’s only fit for turtles and a few fish.”

“Hmm.” There was no need to ask how the lake got the name Moonglow. He’d probably return with a smart-aleck reply.

“They named it Moonglow”—he flashed me an amused look—“because it seems to change color under the moon’s stages.”

God purposely sent wind through the trees, lifting his soft brown hair to settle over his eyes, just to torture me. Every few seconds, he had to do this infuriatingly cute swipe of his hand to brush it away so he could see.

“The main road used to go to the original owner’s daughter’s school. It was a long walk.” He stopped, his attention drawn to the forest beside us. The muscles in his back tensed. His hair stayed in his eyes. He turned and put his forefinger over his lips. Then he did the strangest thing. Cole lifted his chin, closed his eyes, and took a deep breath. He jerked his head toward me, his eyes wide. He mouthed, “Don’t move.”

“Why? What in the world could you have sm—”

He covered my mouth with his soiled hand.

I jerked back and slapped his hand away.

Okay, surely to goodness he didn’t think he could smell danger. He was probably gonna lick his finger, put it to the wind, and tell me a bear came through there three weeks ago, traveling south. I mean, really. Who did this guy think he was? MacGyver?

“I said quiet,” he seethed.

“I didn’t say anything.” I matched his tone.

His glare pierced me. “There’s a—there’s something out there, and if you don’t want to be its next meal, you’ll shut that aggravating little mouth of yours.”

I’d almost rather have my flesh ripped from my bones with me alive to witness it than to spend another second with the guy. What an ass.

“It’s gone.” He nodded in the direction of the trail. “Come on.”

“If you think I’m going any farther into these woods with you, you’re as crazy as you look.” I planted myself in the weeds, my arms stubbornly crossed.

“It’s stay here and be eaten by the bear that came through here a few minutes ago, or follow me. My dear, I’m the least dangerous animal in these woods.”

“Animal? Yeah, that’s about right.”

He let out something that sounded like a growl again and disappeared into the thick overgrowth.

Where’d he go?

Something moved in the grass to the left of me, and then a stick broke behind me.